Those words stop us in our tracks. When a family member or friend tells us they have a story to tell, we perk up. Evolution tells us stories are hardwired in our nature. We see this in drawings on cave walls. In today’s world, we see new stories from around the world, movies entertain us with elaborate stories of fantasy, drama and love. We see stories on our computers, tablets, and in what our friends share on social media.

Stories are everywhere and especially in good marketing. Even in marketing to seniors.

Let’s say you have an aging mother, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to care for her. You’re busy working and leading a professional life, and you worry because she just had a fall, only inches from tumbling down the stairs. You decide it’s time to start looking for a community that can make both your lives easier.

My sister lives in Brooklyn NY. She lives in Williamsburg, an up and coming area. I went to visit her recently and we decided to explore a new part of town.

It was a beautiful day, so we decided to go on a long bike ride to explore new areas.

After a couple hours and going down many side streets we were a little lost and tired. If you know anything about my sister, she’s terrible with directions. And if you confront her about it, she turns into a fire breathing dragon.

I didn’t want to get her too worked up so, as it wouldn’t help anything, we decided it would be good to grab a bite to eat.

According to Chitika, 24% of searches have a local intent on Google search results. This means people are using the major search engines to find local businesses and more information locally. This is huge and the search engines have been taking action.

In our market, everything is local. Especially online.

The typical way a prospect searches is “the service they’re looking for + the town they’re looking for it in”.

Why this really matters, is major search engines are giving away their top advertising spots to local businesses. There is a service for local businesses called Google Places. Google Places are the local business results with the pushpin markers on the search results. These listings are free to the local businesses that take advantage and verify their listing.

These listings are displayed to prospects who are early in the research phases. They’re not yet looking for a specific community. For example, a listing will be displayed when someone types “assisted living Springfield MA”. This is where’s it’s critical to get your community in front of them.

If you do a search for Google places you’ll find where you can claim your community’s listing. To find Yahoo, and Bing’s services, just go to the respected search engines and type in “add local business listings to (insert search engine’s name)” and you’ll find the appropriate places.

When filling out the listings there’s 4 critical elements you need to have in order to achieve a top listing.

Have you ever had to tell someone they have something stuck between their teeth? It’s embarrassing right?

I have that similar feeling in the pit of my stomach. I’m about to tell you the equivalent of having a poppy seed between your teeth in a crowded restaurant. What I’m about to say is a little controversial, and may offend you. But I truly care about your success. So, I’m going to come right out and say it.

A fancy website from a marketing company is nothing more than a digital brochure. I know you might be mad and upset. You’ve paid good money for your website.

The company that sold it to you said it would grow your business. You need it to “brand” your community. You believed it, feeling the site would generate new leads and business.

The Google team responsible for search, recently announced an update to the engine behind the beast. This is the biggest update they've made in 12 years. They call this latest update hummingbird. Here's some details if you want to read more.

We're still waiting to hear all the details about it, but from what I know, it's geared to analyze searches and return answers to questions versus just looking at keywords independently. I have a droid phone and notice now a woman like siri responds to my questions when I use the voice search. She tends to keeps me company when the sox are playing and I'm on the road.

This 4th of July weekend, me and my girlfriend saw some fireworks. The town nearby was having an event Saturday night at the high school.

The school was surrounded by giant overhanging oak trees. They must have been 175 years old. Once we went under these massive oaks, a hill opened up to a beautiful valley and at the bottom was a stage an instrumental band. They were playing Frank Sinatra and classical music from American composers. It really felt like the 4th of July, and it was an exciting time.

Just before dusk something happened that I haven’t seen done on the 4th. While we were waiting for the fireworks, people were lighting lanterns that would float up into the sky. They were fascinating to me because some had neat patriotic designs, and they went up, and up, and up really fast!

These people were lighting 4,5, 6 at a time, and they would fly till you couldn’t see them anymore. We were really fascinated by this, and so were a lot of people around us. The little kids were shouting, “Mommy, mommy, look at the lan-tuns”!